May 22, 2003
This is only about me. I would never claim it applies to anyone else, ever.
I seriously don't know how people who dwell long-term in the social sciences hack it. The sheer inevitability of someone saying "nuh-uh! that doesn't apply to me/my sister/my dog!" when one notes a trend just exhausts me. Then there are those who readily champion the need for a free press, quality art, quality entertainment, enriching friendships, all the things that sustain a person aesthetically and emotionally —- who simultaneously and bizarrely maintain that we are completely autonomous beings who are never influenced by the culture around us. Dude, if we're not influenced by the culture around us, why are you bothering on about the view from your office window, your annoying co-workers, the cutting of NEA funding, whatever? If nothing has an impact on you, if you are a fully formed human being who will not be swayed by external circumstances, why bother trying to change those circumstances? Even super-duper hardcore Buddhists (which is sort of an oxymoron, I guess) will admit that they went through a LOT of work to get to the point where they can work up some indifference to their surroundings.
But damn if there aren't people who would come this shy of arguing that it is a TOTAL COINCIDENCE that Japanese babies born in Japan to Japanese-speaking families end up speaking Japanese as their first language and Italian babies born in Italy to Italian-speaking families end up speaking Italian as their first language. (And here watch as someone pipes up with "well I know this girl who was born in Italy, but she learned Spanish first." Because that would be just totally par for the course in this sort of discussion. I can set my clock by it.)
Lila Abu-Lughod, who wrote one of my all-time favorite books (Writing Women's Worlds) has written about the inherent contradiction between the need to avoid "trafficking in generalizations" and the fact that cultural anthropology's raison d'être is the study of human behavior in all its manifestations and as such relies on offering up an analysis that goes slightly deeper — or rather wider? — than "John woke up. John put on his shoes. John had oatmeal for breakfast." The way most seriously unreadable ethnographers seem to deal with this is to say "John woke up. John put on his shoes. NOT ALL MEN NAMED JOHN WEAR SHOES. John had oatmeal for breakfast. NOT ALL MEN NAMED JOHN EAT OATMEAL FOR BREAKFAST. IN FACT, NOT ALL MEN NAMED JOHN EAT BREAKFAST PERIOD. EVEN THIS MAN NAMED JOHN DOES NOT EAT OATMEAL FOR BREAKFAST EVERY DAY OF HIS LIFE. WHICH BRINGS TO MIND THE PROBLEMATIC NOTIONS OF 'OATMEAL' AND 'BREAKFAST.' AND 'EAT' [see 3-paragraph footnote]."
It's tedious, you know? It's tedious as hell. And it's not just tedious, it undermines the entire point of the endeavor, which is to create some kind of descriptive narrative that is applicable to circumstances outside of those being directly observed. Note that "circumstances outside of" != "all circumstances everywhere on the planet ever in the history of all time Isweartogod I've just figured it out Once And For All."
It goes beyond noting that the plural of anecdote is not data and that one person's inability to identify with a particular thesis doesn't mean the thesis is inherently wrong, unless said thesis was literally arguing "all x are…" (e.g. that Men Are From Mars crap). It has to start with the very basic premise that people ARE influenced by the world around them. That kids in Japan speak Japanese for a reason. And that if such variables in our environment exist, they can, perhaps, be studied, discerned, analyzed, discussed. Some analyses will be better than others and some will be just downright offensive and some people doing the analyzing will be people you really, really wish had stayed out of the conversation, but all that is separate from the act of questioning itself.
I think what's really at the root of this is the pain that comes from being misrepresented. Which happens, like, constantly, especially to people(s) who aren't charged with writing the narratives. Not just in the macro sense ("The Arab Mind"; "Lakota Traditions") but in the smaller acts of applying to a particular reading to a particular phenomenon ("this movie sends the message that…") — both make assumptions about audience, and can be not just 'problematic' but actually painful if it's a view you don't share. And yet what I want to see is a way to deal with that, the misrepresentation, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
More and more people resort to I-statements to get around this problem — "I had oatmeal for breakfast" "my coming out experience went like this" "as a disabled person I feel" — and maybe that's the way to go. "Speak for yourself, mister! Oh wait, you are." But in addition to turning discourse into the academic equivalent of a me-fest replete with parallel play ordinarily associated with toddlers — I'm over here with my yo-yo/experience/history, you go be over there with yours — it ignores the question of people as agents of influence on others. How can I say that I was influenced by this or that without accepting at least the possibility that others might be, too, and so I should adjust my behavior accordingly? I mean if I were terrorized by, I dunno, scary clowns as a child, I can admit that not all children are but that some might be, it's a reasonable thing to think, and therefore I maybe should think twice about dressing up as a scary clown and hanging out at a day care center. But there I go, making assumptions about audience, and have likely offended more than one 4-year-old who LOVES SCARY CLOWNS. And if one of those 4-year-olds happens to protest, there we'll be, stuck, arguing about "some" vs. "all" for the next five years, and never get to the part about what it is about clowns that can be frightening.
Stasis. It's maddening.
